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The Screening Room Cavia presents the legendary Hans Richter! The German avant-gardist, film experimenter, painter and graphic artist, with 6 of his short experimental films, some specially screened with a new musical underscore. After a short break the surrealist feature film Dreams That Money Can Buy will be shown.

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A programme of screenings to accompany the exhibition “The Thinking Machine. Ramon Llull and the «ars combinatoria»”

Before artists worked with computers, a series of avant-garde painters such as Oskar Fischinger, Harry Smith and Jordan Belson created a form of non-narrative film that addressed geometry, the possibilities of mathematic combinations, and spirituality. After these visionaries, artists like John Whitney embraced the new synthetic image medium to continue exploring abstract animation. Many artists have followed in their wake, up until the present day.

Avanti Film Discourse is happy to invite you to its second screening, featuring a fine selection of classical experimental films, as well as contemporary works. The topic of this edition: parallel lines.

Parallels never meet, they go alongside without direct interchange. Nevertheless, there is visibility, observation of each other, which, one can argue, is enough to produce an influence, even change. Like the parallel montage technique, two story lines, which don't interfere, build a new meaning through their alignment. So this topic is a lot about indirect influence and power.

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Tuesday, March 10, 2015 - 19:30

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From the earliest Lumière actualities to King Vidor’s *The Crowd* (1928) and onward through *Spring Breakers* (2012), cinema has given apt expression to masses and what they seemingly do best: massing. This program presents a survey of crowds, masses, and swarms in their many and varied manifestations: from the elemental to the complex, and from the archaic to the contemporary. Though often hidden beneath a veneer of solidity, masses and swarms are the very stuff of life. Gathering and dispersing, contracting and expanding, are the formal figures most proper to them. They exist at the level of particles and parades, demonstrations and desktop icons, spermatozoa and shopping mallers. Even the grain of film, the noise of video, the pixilation of a buffering stream—they, too, with their swirling and spreading, justly merit the name of “crowd.” Wherever division, multiplicity, and movement co-exist, masses and swarms are sure to follow: on the street, in the density of a throng; in the depths of the body, cell against cell.

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Thursday, February 5, 2015 - 19:00

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RE:VOIR is proud to announce the release of the new DVD "FREE RADICALS - A HISTORY OF EXPERIMENTAL FILM" by Pip Chodorov. The DVD features 8 bonus short films by key filmmakers who appear in the documentary and it is subtitled in 8 languages (FRANÇAIS, ESPAÑOL, SRPSKI, ČESKÉ, LIETUVIŲ, 中文, 日本語, 한국어). It also includes a 56-page booklet with texts by Jonas Mekas, Scott Hammen, Raphaël Bassan and Nathaniel Draper.

"Free Radicals" has been screened in 50 international festivals and distributed theatrically in France, USA and Canada.

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This feature-length documentary provides a vivid, eye-opening, and appropriately personal introduction to one of the most important, yet perpetually marginalized, realms of filmmaking: avant-garde cinema.

“I want to make cinema that is both trance-like and transparent: that operates on dream logic until disrupted by a moment of self-reflexivity, like tripping on an extension cord.”

What are we seeing when watching images flickering on the screen? One could say that the cinematic experience always involves an unique play of imaginary presence (perceptual experiences, fantasies, illusions) and real absence (what is represented but not really there). The act of perception may be real, but the perceived is merely a shade, a phantom, “a hallucination that is also a fact”. It is this fundamental tension between presence and absence, actual and perceptual, the visible and the spectre of the hidden, that is at the heart of Mary Helena Clark’s work. Taking cues from the fantasy and illusion of early cinema as well as the material and formal exercises of the avant-garde, her hypnotic pieces explore cinema’s primitive magic, hurtling us down the secretive rabbit holes of the moving image. After having screened several of Mary Helena’s films in previous years, Courtisane will once again showcase her work during the coming Courtisane festival (17-21 April 2013), with the screening of her latest short film, Orpheus (outtakes). As a prologue to this year’s festival, Courtisane will present at OFFoff six films by Mary Helena Clark together with a selection of works by other filmmakers that have inspired her practice.